The Inspectre Mysteries
A show lost in time, restored using AI psychic reconstruction
The Inspectre Mysteries was one of the 30s most unique radio detective shows, though all known recordings have been lost or corrupted. But recently, a partial script was rediscovered. Using cutting-edge artificial intelligence, and with your help, we plan reconstruct a complete two-part episode for the first time in over 80 years.
We are proud to present ...
Part 1 of The Inspectre Mysteries Episode 9: The Ghost Train
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Part 2 of The Inspectre Mysteries Episode 9: The Ghost Train
Starring: Hedvig Skirgård, Stephen Mann, Seán Roberts, Liz Irvine, Lyredrake, Bryce Kositz, and Daniel Robertson.
A show ahead of its time ...
The Inspectre Mysteries was a murder mystery radio contest program developed by Doffle-Brington, Inc. and broadcast on WNOX (Knoxville, TN) between 1936 and 1937 in the United States. The program featured a detective simply known only as the Inspectre: a ghost tied to our mortal plane until she can solve her own murder. Each week, the Insperctre solved crimes with her trusty sidekick Dr. Swilcherd Sindyand and got closer to discovering the truth about her own demise. Curiously for detective shows of the time, the story is set in the distant future, with space travel, ray guns, and hypdrocertalinators, a technology that Doffle-Brington had in development but was never manufactured.
Each episode was aired in two parts. In the first part, the Inspectre would gather clues, and the audience would be asked to try to solve the case. A week later, the solution would be broadcast in the second part. Listeners could send their answers into their local Doffle-Brington dealership for a chance to win a share of a $50,000 cash prize.
Star of the show Meggy Appleby recalls the hype:
"People were blowing their wigs for it! Each week we would get thousands of entries with solutions ranging from insightfully optimistic to wickedly deranged. Here and there, someone would get part of the cat by the tail, but do you know - I don't think there was a single person who ever hit on the correct answer. Why, I was so busy bumping gums, that there were times I had no idea what was happening. It was just that kind of show".
... lost to time
During the second World War, audio tapes were in short supply, and many backup tapes for WNOX shows were reclaimed by the military. Only a very few traces of the show survived: the episode listings, a handful of short promo recordings preserved by the American Radio Archives, and of course the happy, rather confused, memories of tens of thousands of listeners.
In 1991, during the demolition of the WNOX recording studios, the paper script of one episode was discovered wedged behind a soundboard. It was an episode titled "The Space Ghost Train", which took place on a space train and ended with three suspects, two of which had confessed. Frustratingly, the second part was not included, leaving us with a mystery without a solution. Perhaps fitting for a show about a ghost trapped by their own mystery?
Human-AI crowd restoration
Recently, new A.I. techniques have been developed to aid historical restoration, including GPT-3, GPT-Neo, GPT-Red, and GPT-Blue. As promising as these are, the restoration of The Inspectre Mysteries seemed impossible given the lack of training data.
However, a new method may be able to boost to A.I. prediction by harnessing the collective wisdom of human listeners. As Appleby notes, listeners were often able to predict parts of the solution. What if we were able to harness the attempted solutions of thousands of listeners? Would that be enough to feed to an A.I. text hypergenerator to recover the true ending of an Inspectre Mystery for the first time in three generations?
A Ghost of a Chance
Here's where you come in: We've used the partial script to re-record an episode of The Inspectre Mysteries. Listen to it and tweet your solution using the hashtag #SpaceGhostTrain.
Your submission could include:
- The identity of the murderer
- The evidence they are the murderer
- Evidence someone is not the murderer
The solutions will be scraped in real time by our customised A.I. in order to produce a script for the second part. We will then record the second part to be broadcast one week later, just like the original Inspectre Mysteries.
Please only include anachronisms that are projected within the bounds of the show's canon, as non-canonical anachronisms will cause hyperparameter drift.
Enter your solution
Don't delay, tweet your solution to The Inspectre Mysteries: The Space Ghost Train now!
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